As poachers grow bolder, Andrea Turkalo records the behavior of a vanishing species.

In November, 2011, a caravan of poachers—as many as a hundred, by some counts—crossed into the Central African Republic on horseback from Sudan. They rode seven hundred miles along the northern border, and entered Bouba-Njida National Park, in Cameroon. The caravan included a pack train of camels loaded with AK-47s, bags of ammunition, heavy machine guns, and two mortars. The poachers had been in the park before, in 2010, when they killed about a dozen elephants and two park guards. This time, they were shooting elephants in far greater numbers, and in some cases sawing off the tusks while the animals were still alive. Céline Sissler-Bienvenu, a regional director for the U.S.-based International Fund for Animal Welfare, heard about the slaughter, travelled to the park, and notified the authorities in Yaoundé, the capital. Cameroon’s government sent a contingent of Army troops to drive the poachers out. A handful of people on each side were killed or wounded in skirmishes, but the poachers, who were by then better acquainted with the park’s geography, continued about their business.

“They were very well organized,” Sissler-Bienvenu recalled. “Very well armed, very strategic, and they implemented ambushes in military style.” Some of the men were believed to be members of Rizeigat, a nomadic Arab group with ties to the janjaweed and to the Darfuri genocide. They cut pieces from the elephants’ ears to use as gris-gris. The manager of a lodge in Bouba-Njida Park, who encountered a group of the poachers on horseback, recalled, “When you looked at them, they stared straight back at you. They didn’t fear anything from anybody.”

As the killings continued, Sissler-Bienvenu went to the press, and soon Le Monde ran a story featuring photographs of elephants with their trunks missing and their faces cut off. A copy of the newspaper found its way to Cameroon’s President, Paul Biya, who was staying at a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva. He ordered an additional three hundred troops into Bouba-Njida, but they, too, failed to drive out the poachers. In the three months that the poachers were in the park, they killed six hundred and fifty elephants.

After leaving Cameroon, the men split into smaller groups, and four of them apparently detoured north, toward Zakouma National Park, in neighboring Chad, where, just outside the park, they slaughtered nine more elephants before rangers spotted their camp from the air. When the rangers reached the camp, three of the poachers were out hunting; the fourth escaped on foot, and his horse was killed in the crossfire. The rangers found thousands of rounds of ammunition, along with uniforms, documents, and phones linking the men to specific Army and paramilitary units in Sudan. The poachers remained at large. Three weeks later, at dawn, as a group of Muslim park guards knelt in prayer, the poachers shot them all in the back. They seized the guards’ horses and fled to Sudan.

The Bouba-Njida attack was one of the bloodiest massacres of elephants to date, and represented a serious escalation in the tactics and the daring of poachers in Africa. George Wittemyer, the chairman of the scientific board of the conservation group Save the Elephants, characterized the event as a “significant awakening,” involving “a terrorist militia coming into a relatively effectively governed country and engaging successfully with the Army—even, arguably, driving it off.”

Elephants are under siege throughout Africa. Demand for ivory is increasing in Asia: once prized by Chinese aristocrats, it is now sought by members of China’s growing middle class, who buy ivory cigarette holders, chopsticks, and even carved miniature elephants. In Hong Kong, a hub of illegal trade, ivory can sell for three thousand dollars a pound. The price has tripled in the past four years, and a pair of carved tusks can be worth two hundred thousand dollars. The poachers themselves are paid much less—only a hundred or two hundred dollars a pound—but that goes far in Africa. Criminal organizations trafficking in illegally obtained ivory have sprung up in recent years, and the money involved has begun to attract terror groups—not just the janjaweed from Sudan but also, according to reports, the Shabab, from Somalia, and the Lord’s Resistance Army, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. The overlap of organized crime and terrorism has become a concern for the Obama Administration, which recently announced an aggressive plan to involve American intelligence agencies, including the F.B.I. and the D.E.A., in tracking and targeting wildlife traffickers.

The forest elephants roaming the dense jungles of the Congo Basin, south and east of Cameroon, have only recently been identified as a species distinct from the larger, savanna elephants found at Bouba-Njida and elsewhere on the continent. Because their habitat is virtually inaccessible, little is known about them. Stephen Blake, of the Max Planck Institute, who studied the feeding and range habits of forest elephants, refers to them as the “megagardeners of the forest.” The animals consume a great deal of fruit, and play a crucial role in dispersing, through their dung, the seeds of tropical fruit trees. Blake described to me their “extreme spatiotemporal intelligence,” and their ability to keep track of one another in the dense environment through the use of “infrasound,” a frequency below the level audible to humans. Their ivory, sometimes called hot ivory or pink ivory, is especially coveted on the illegal market.

The person who knows forest elephants best is an American researcher in the Central African Republic named Andrea Turkalo. She has spent more than twenty years camped out in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park, near a bai, or clearing, where the elephants congregate in numbers unequalled at any other site. A wryly humorous woman of sixty-three, who wears her hair in a tightly pulled-back bun, Turkalo has gained most of her expertise in the field; her only scientific credential is an undergraduate degree in environmental studies from Antioch College, in Ohio. She spends much of her time alone or in the company of local trackers. When I visited her camp, a few months ago, she told me that she grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts, in a working-class family. Her father, a Second World War veteran, was a guard at the Bridgewater state prison; her mother taught in a school for children with special needs. The Taunton Public Library sustained Andrea from the age of six, and she still checks books out from there electronically and reads two a week on a Nexus tablet. She said that she’d just finished Edvard Radzinsky’s biography of Stalin and Caroline Moorehead’s “A Train in Winter,” a history of French Resistance women imprisoned at Birkenau. “That’s why I like being here,” she said. “You have time to focus on things.”

Turkalo arrived at Dzanga-Ndoki in 1990, after working in the Peace Corps elsewhere in the Central African Republic. She and her husband at the time, the explorer Mike Fay, had been hired to run the new park. “I liked elephants, but I never thought I’d end up studying them,” she told me. But then the couple discovered the clearing, called Dzanga bai, several miles away. “The first time we went out there, we pitched a tent right on the bai,” Turkalo said. “We heard the elephants calling the entire night.”

They began to visit as often as they could. “We understood that in East Africa elephants had been identified for years by patterns on the ears, by sex, by age, and by tusk size,” Turkalo said. Nothing like that had been done with forest elephants, and the couple started making identification cards for each one they encountered. “Initially, it was overwhelming. We spent two years just making cards.” With money from the World Wildlife Fund, she established a camp in the forest near the bai. Around that time, Fay left to set up a new national park in Congo, and the couple later broke up. For the past seventeen years, Turkalo has been a salaried employee of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

“I really got hooked on knowing individual elephants, understanding their stories,” she said. “It’s become steadily more engrossing. They’ve grown on me as characters and different personalities.”

Dzanga-Ndoki is one of a series of adjacent transnational parks covering almost three thousand square miles on either side of the Sangha River as it flows through the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, and Cameroon. In 2012, the parks, collectively referred to as the Sangha Tri-National Protected Area, were named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, because of their size and their relatively undisturbed condition, which could insure the “continuation of ecological and evolutionary processes at a huge scale.” They provide habitat not only for forest elephants but also for Nile crocodiles, western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, giant forest hogs, sitatungas (swamp antelopes), and bongos (large forest antelopes).

Turkalo’s camp, deep in the forest, is a mile or so from the bai, and she walks there every day, fording the Modoubou River and climbing a rickety staircase to a roofed viewing platform on stilts. The bai, in the middle of otherwise unbroken forest, is kept clear by the elephants themselves. A shallow stream meanders across a sandy pan; a doleritic intrusion of volcanic bedrock lies just beneath the surface and infuses the water with minerals that the elephants need. At any given time, as many as a hundred gather there. Turkalo’s job, as she recently described it, is to create “the basic knowledge of the demography and behavior of this species.”

On March 24, 2013, Turkalo made the eight-mile drive along a punishing dirt road from her forest camp to Bayanga, a town of about three thousand and the site of the headquarters of the Dzanga-Sangha Protected Area complex, the Central African Republic component of the tri-national park system. Turkalo was concerned about the disintegrating political situation in the capital, Bangui, two hundred and fifty miles to the northeast. The Central African Republic is predominantly Christian, but a loose coalition of mostly Muslim rebels, known as the Seleka, was threatening to overthrow the government of President François Bozizé. Turkalo had lived through other coups, but in those the violence had been confined to the capital. The Seleka were different; Muslims are a minority in the Central African Republic, and the Seleka had recruited battle-hardened mercenaries from the lawless borderlands of Chad and Sudan—including two thousand janjaweed from Darfur—to support their cause. “The Seleka were frightening to people, because many of them were Sudanese,” Turkalo told me. The Sudanese were historically associated with the slave trade, which persisted in parts of Central Africa into the nineteen-thirties.

Once Turkalo reached Bayanga, she called on Ould Amou Chamek, a Mauritanian Muslim who ran a small grocery store that was the nerve center of town. Turkalo describes Chamek as someone who has “a balanced and informed angle” on world events. He told her that Bozizé’s government had already fallen, and he feared that the Seleka would move quickly on the Bayanga region, where the fleeing President had a house with a helipad. Turkalo and the few remaining expatriates in Bayanga decided to leave.

She returned to her camp and retrieved some clothes and six hard drives of data, including her photographs. “I had been through this drill before,” she told me later. “So I had it mapped out in my head.” By the time she got back to Bayanga, it was dusk. With Anna Feistner, the chief technical adviser for the Dzanga-Sangha Protected Area, and three other women, she got in a launch and headed down the Sangha toward Bomassa, the first town inside Congo. There are no banks or financial services anywhere near Bayanga, and the women were carrying the equivalent of twenty-five thousand dollars in Central African francs. By the time they reached Lindjombo, the Congolese border post, it was dark. The border guards heard the boat’s engine, and, worried that it carried Seleka, began firing warning volleys with their Kalashnikovs.

Turkalo’s group steered the boat to the riverbank. One of the border guards recognized Turkalo and Feistner; they had once given him a utility battery worth a hundred dollars. The guards let them go, and the women got back on the river. The light of a nearly full moon helped them dodge sandbars. Five hours later, they reached Bomassa, and the headquarters of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, in the Congolese part of the tri-national system. More than a year and a half passed before Turkalo could return permanently to Dzanga bai.

Recent studies indicate that, across Africa, between thirty thousand and forty thousand elephants are poached each year, and that an elephant is killed every fifteen minutes. Between 2010 and 2012, around a hundred thousand were killed. Fewer than five hundred thousand are thought to remain.

Poaching has particularly affected forest elephants. Forests in the Central African Republic and Congo are being carved up by logging roads, many of them built by Chinese timber companies, opening up formerly remote regions to poachers. A report in the online journal PLOS ONE found that, between 2002 and 2011, the number of forest elephants declined by sixty-two per cent, and in those years they lost nearly a third of their range. As few as eighty thousand remain. Increasingly, scientists use the word “extinction” in connection with forest elephants. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a zoologist who pioneered the study of elephant social behavior, said that “to a great extent they are finished.” Tomo Nishihara, the technical adviser for Nouabalé-Ndoki, told me that between 2006 and 2011 the number of elephants in the park and its surrounding buffer zones fell from ten thousand to five thousand. “That gives us five more years before they’re gone,” he said.

One of the organizations working to protect forest elephants is the Project for the Application of Law for Fauna, or PALF, which is based in Brazzaville, the capital of Congo. In a café there, I met with Naftali Honig, a twenty-nine-year-old former Brooklynite, who founded PALF in 2010. Congo has laws against wildlife crime, including poaching, but few if any charges were ever brought until PALF came along. The organization builds cases against wildlife criminals and follows them through Congo’s justice system.

A colleague of Honig’s, a Congolese lawyer named Kevin Tsengou-Elenga, pointed out that poaching is often enabled by corrupt government officials, who exist in a condition of generalized impunity, and it intensified after the civil wars that broke out in Congo in the late nineteen-nineties. “Those who fought had to be compensated,” Tsengou-Elenga said. “Many were given positions in government for which they had no qualifications.”

“We want justice to function,” Honig said. “It’s bigger than wildlife. My hope is that we’re getting at the root of natural-resource management. There are enough resources here for people to live comfortably for centuries. Congo could be sustainably managed. I’d hate to see it all go to waste.” He added, “I don’t want Congo to become another Central African Republic.”

In the Central African Republic, the decline of the elephant population—both savanna elephants and forest elephants—has been far more precipitate and has been going on for much longer than it has in Congo or in other parts of the region. For decades, horse and camel caravans have gathered in Sudan at the beginning of the dry season, when the rivers can be forded, and then crossed into the Central African Republic. Traditionally, poachers carried only swords and lances, but beginning in the early nineteen-seventies, as Sudan and Chad were consumed by civil wars, they gained access to automatic weapons.

The Central African Republic once had an extensive system of parks; after years of poverty, chaos, and government neglect, that system has largely collapsed. Paula Kahumbu, a Kenyan elephant ecologist and the C.E.O. of WildlifeDirect, a Nairobi-based advocacy group, argues that wildlife should be considered a “national asset” for each African country. The problem for governments and for conservation groups, she said, was devising ways for the benefits of wildlife conservation to trickle down to local communities.

The anarchy in the Central African Republic has made it difficult to effect the kind of equitable resource allocation that PALF advocates, let alone the careful wildlife management that Kahumbu describes. Biologists told me that the Central African Republic may once have contained a million elephants, of which only a few thousand remain—most of them in Turkalo’s area. Much of the rest of the country consists of mesic savanna—dense shrubland alternating with impenetrable swamp—which is largely beyond the reach of government. There is no cell-phone service, no infrastructure. The region’s few inhabitants are semi-nomadic pastoralists. As Bas Huijbregts, who until recently served as the head of the World Wildlife Fund’s campaign against the illegal wildlife trade in Central Africa, said, “It’s a black hole of information. No one knows what’s going on there.”

By the end of March, 2013, within days of Turkalo’s departure from Bayanga, the Seleka had arrived—“seventeen-year-old kids with hand grenades,” as Louis Sarno, a friend of Turkalo’s, described them. The invaders came in waves, looting the park offices and stealing vehicles, ecoguards’ weapons, and police radios. Turkalo likened the Seleka to driver ants, devouring everything in their path. A man deemed to have spoken disrespectfully of the Seleka was shot. The guards in Dzanga-Ndoki, long considered one of the best-protected sites in Central Africa, fled into the forest.

Within a few weeks, Bayanga fell under the command of a Chadian colonel named Ismail Bahit. Once a camel herder, he now wore designer sunglasses and carried a .38 Special. People said that he had a quiet intelligence. His main job, in keeping with the Seleka’s reputation as a looting operation, was escorting a group of Chinese prospectors dredging for diamonds along the shores of the Sangha.

On May 5th, a truck arrived from Yaloke, a town in the north, carrying seventeen Sudanese men armed with automatic rifles. They had an ordre de mission from a Seleka general in Bangui. One of their comrades, the order said, had gone missing, and they had been granted permission to travel to the elephant bai to look for him. They told local residents that he had been kidnapped by an evil white woman. That night, the Sudanese men stayed with Colonel Bahit in Bayanga; the next morning, they prayed with him, and even though he must have known that their story made no sense, he let them go to Dzanga bai. During the next two days, they killed twenty-six elephants, mostly females and their young, and removed their tusks.

The massacre of elephants at Dzanga bai was a shock to many conservationists, but the slaughter could have been much worse. One explanation for why it wasn’t, widely credited in Bayanga, is that Ould Amou Chamek, the Mauritanian shopkeeper, gradually turned Colonel Bahit against the poachers, until Bahit became enraged and ordered them to leave the bai. The story is based on the view that, during the nine months of Seleka control, Chamek, as a Muslim, played an important moderating role in Bayanga, protecting residents and park resources.

A second explanation comes from Nir Kalron, a Tel Aviv-based former Israeli special-forces operative. Kalron, whose father was an Israeli Air Force colonel who trained pilots for the Kenya Wildlife Service, is the founder of Maisha Consulting, an environmental-security organization that conducts wildlife-oriented anti-poaching, anti-trafficking, and intelligence operations in Africa. Kalron and a Maisha colleague, Omer Barak, were in Tel Aviv when they saw the news of the Dzanga bai slaughter on the BBC. “We read the volume of e-mails,” Kalron told me. “People wishing there was something they could do. We developed the idea that, with our military backgrounds, we might actually be able to save some elephants.”

Kalron and his colleagues had worked in Bouba-Njida after the massacre there, and had become familiar with the janjaweed ring. Barak contacted Turkalo, who was in the United States at that time, and she put him in touch with Chamek. Kalron and a colleague travelled through Cameroon and quietly crossed the Sangha to Bayanga.

They arrived less than ten days after the attack on Dzanga bai. Chamek met them at the riverbank and took them to Colonel Bahit. Bahit had not known they were coming, and the meeting was tense until Kalron offered two hundred kilograms of food and medicine, and convinced Bahit that further poaching would provoke international sanctions. Bahit gave Kalron permission to visit the bai.

When the Israelis arrived, the bai was littered with decaying elephant carcasses. The killers hadn’t shot from the viewing stand, Kalron said: “They stood across the bai from behind a screen of bushes—probably so that they’d be downwind. There were five to seven shooters. They’re professional hunters.”

Kalron was able to collect shell casings, and, with the help of Conflict Armament, a British N.G.O., and C4ADS, based in Washington, traced some of them to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard factory in Tehran. The ammunition had come through Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, an Iranian ally, and matched casings that Maisha had found in Bouba-Njida. “It’s a sophisticated network,” Kalron said. “They didn’t just stumble onto the bai—they were aiming at it.”

Maisha was subsequently hired by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the World Wildlife Fund to protect the bai and to investigate the poachers. Kalron and a colleague travelled to Bangui, where Seleka informants told them that the poachers were based in villages surrounding Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, and had provided the Seleka with arms. One of the poachers was a general in the Sudanese janjaweed. “Their payment was the bai,” Barak told me.

I asked Kalron why Colonel Bahit had changed his mind about permitting the poaching.

“He didn’t,” Kalron replied. “The poachers left because they couldn’t fit any more ivory in their truck. That, and the elephants had all fled. They’d been scared off. There was nothing more to shoot.”

Since forest elephants are almost impossible to track in their dense habitat, the bai offers the only practical means of studying their behavior. Colleagues describe Turkalo as an astute and dedicated observer. They note that these days most scientists spend only a few years in the field, and “longevity studies,” like Turkalo’s, have become rare. “One of the reasons she’s so important is that she’s a repository of observations on things that will never be repeated,” Peter Wrege, the director of the Elephant Listening Project, at Cornell University, told me. As elephants are being poached ever closer to extinction, George Wittemyer, of Save the Elephants, says, “the basic biology that Turkalo has been working to establish—behavior, relationships, the age at which they become reproductive—is what scientists would need to try and rebuild a population.”

“A lot of it is in her head,” Wrege said. “No one is ever going to spend twenty years again doing what she’s doing.”

After the Seleka drove Turkalo out, she spent time at Cornell, where Wittemyer and Wrege helped her to mine her data. They served as co-authors of Turkalo’s first paper in almost ten years, “Long-Term Monitoring of Dzanga Bai Forest Elephants: Forest-Clearing Use Patterns.” The paper was published by PLOS One in December, 2013, and was the fruit of the visual encyclopedia that Turkalo had developed after two decades of observing nearly thirty-two hundred elephants. Noting the distinctive patterns of tears and holes in their ears, the curvature of their tusks, body scarring, and the morphology of their tails, Turkalo extracted information on age ranges, bai visit patterns, and the size of family groups. “People ask me why I didn’t computerize elephant identification,” she said. “I never wanted to, because my method forced me to do the work of recognizing each one individually.”

She went on, “I like watching any kind of behavior. I try to understand motivation. With elephants, it’s relatedness that determines where loyalties are. With humans, it’s not so predictable. Loyalties don’t always determine behavior. Humans are the most frightening in terms of behavior.”

In January, 2014, with the Central African Republic in chaos, the Seleka, under heavy pressure from both regional and international powers, formally stood aside. An interim government was established, propped up by troops from France, the African Union, and, eventually, the United Nations. But the abuses inflicted by the Seleka had generated a counter-reaction, in the form of the “antibalaka,” nominally Christian vigilantes, whom neither the interim government nor its international backers were able to control. Draped with juju, and armed with knives and homemade guns, the antibalaka stole what little the Seleka had left behind. In Bayanga, they looted market stalls and chased out the remaining Muslim merchants—including Ould Amou Chamek, who fled back to Mauritania. One antibalaka group appeared in the town square with the severed head of a Muslim, boiled it in a soup, and made a show of eating it. It wasn’t until the end of May, 2014, that a contingent of the reconstituted Central African Republic Army finally drove them out.

Five months later, at the beginning of November, Turkalo was able to return to her camp. It was a wreck. The screens had been ripped, and all her kitchenware, furniture, and reference books had been taken. The index cards identifying decades of bai elephants had been dumped on the floor.

Park authorities had hidden her truck in the forest, but someone had found it, smashed the rear window, and taken the battery, the spare tire, the radio, the jack, and all her tools. “They couldn’t figure out how to start it, or they would have taken it altogether,” she said. But Turkalo, a competent mechanic, was able to get it running again, and when I arrived, by boat up the Sangha, a few weeks later, my luggage included a new truck window.

Turkalo had been loaned a house in Bayanga, and I spent several days there with her while she saw to the truck and the restoration of her camp. I accompanied her to the bai one afternoon, and she seemed relieved to be back. It was the end of the rainy season. We watched from the viewing stand as a herd of forest buffalo flicked flies away with their tails. In front of them, a group of red river hogs rooted in the mud. From the surrounding trees came the twittering of white-throated bee-eaters and the squawking and whistling of gray parrots. A hadada ibis called. In the shallow water, Hartlaub’s ducks picked through dung piles.

We saw fifty or sixty elephants. Small groups wandered in and out, striding in stately procession across the muddy clearing. Forest elephants are affectionate creatures. When they see one another after periods apart, they urinate and defecate in excitement. As we watched, some drilled their trunks deep into the streambed, drank the mineralized water, and sprayed themselves and their neighbors. Young males engaged in mock combat, clacking their small tusks as they pushed and shoved. Older elephants shooed away younger ones, letting out trumpeted calls of annoyance.

“That’s Teardrop,” Turkalo said, pointing to a large female. “And that’s her daughter, Teardrop III. In fact, any that you see together are usually related. They’re very intolerant of elephants to whom they’re not related. It’s either immediate family or extended kin.”

One might have assumed that the elephants before us represented a constant, intact local population. But Turkalo’s observations revealed something more complex: between twelve hundred and fourteen hundred elephants use the bai regularly, but their visits are separated by weeks or, sometimes, years. The elephants in Turkalo’s group spend two per cent or less of their time in the bai. What they do the rest of the year is not known.

Turkalo is working on a paper about rates of reproduction among forest elephants, a subject that has never been examined. Across from the viewing stand, a large bull named Sappho II (his mother was Sappho I) was meticulously covering himself with yellow mud, scooping dirty water up with his trunk and spraying it over his back.

Turkalo explained that males periodically enter into a condition called musth, during which they search for females in estrus and become hyperaggressive toward other males. “The musth males, generally the oldest bulls, guard the females until the exact moment they’re ovulating,” Turkalo said. “Younger bulls will try to run the females down, but the mature bulls prevent them from mating. The females prefer to wait for the older bulls. That’s why, when older bulls are poached, it can lower the group’s fertility. The younger bulls don’t have the finesse.”

Young males live with their family groups until they’re about seven, after which they go off to spend most of their time alone, or associating with other young males. “A lot of bulls never get to mate,” she said, and females give birth only once every five years.

Forest elephants are known as a “K-selected species”—a species with a low reproductive rate but high survivorship. Forest-elephant society is dominated by females, and much of the animals’ ability to survive is attributable to the role of the matriarchs. “For most species, it doesn’t make ecological sense to support females beyond the age of fertility, but elephant matriarchs are repositories of collective knowledge,” Turkalo said. “They know where it’s safe, where there’s food and in what season, what trails in the forest lead to what important food sources.”

Sappho II moved to the center of the bai and pushed smaller elephants away from water holes that he wanted for himself.

“Males are pests,” Turkalo said. “They really are. ”

Turkalo and I had arranged to sleep on the viewing stand that night. At dusk, I was struggling to hang my mosquito net, which was necessary to keep out malaria-carrying mosquitoes and whatever else might crawl up on the platform. I spent a long, cold night on an underinflated air mattress with only a thin sheet covering me, my sleep repeatedly interrupted by trumpeting elephants close by, louder than any Manhattan garbage truck. As part of Nir Kalron’s efforts to protect the bai, his company had installed solar-powered surveillance devices around the clearing, and Wi-Fi on the viewing platform. As the night wore on, I looked at my phone to check the time, and noticed a new e-mail, containing a screen shot of my mosquito net and a message from Kalron, in Tel Aviv: “Big Brother is watching.”

In the morning, Turkalo pointed out an elephant she called Aida II, a young female, but she couldn’t find Aida I, her mother. Aida II, she told me, was about twenty-five, and had three calves. Since Turkalo returned, she’d seen Aida II with her calves, but not with Aida I. They used to be inseparable. “Aida I had only small tusks, but now she’s missing. She may have been one of those who was shot.”

Turkalo had been wondering how elephants, with their highly developed emotional intelligence, coped with the poaching. One day, she told me, an emaciated calf collapsed and died in the bai. In a kind of funeral procession, a hundred elephants trooped by her body, many of them touching her with their trunks. One of them, Miss Lonelyhearts, put the calf’s leg in her mouth and repeatedly tried to yank her up. “Miss L. seems to be an orphan,” Turkalo said. “Her mother may have been poached.”

When people speak about forest-elephant extinction, they don’t mean that the species will disappear completely—animals will survive in zoos and in a few closely guarded parks. What’s at risk is the complex social intelligence of the animals and the intricate ways in which they relate to their forest environment. Stephen Blake, at the Max Planck Institute, has described remote forests crisscrossed by wide-open, elephant-maintained paths, each linking a mineral bai to a grove of fruit-bearing trees or other areas of vital significance to the species. The paths are arguably a physical manifestation of forest-elephant intelligence, but elephants abandon them when their habitat is disrupted. Blake argues that eliminating the role that elephants play in the dispersal of at least seventy-three species of trees in Central African forests—including some that are dispersed exclusively by elephants—has the potential to set off a process of “defaunation,” by which the “competitive balance” of the forest will tip toward “the species-poor guild of abiotically-dispersed species.”

Given that wilderness is disappearing everywhere in Central Africa, elephants are likely to endure only where they contribute to humans’ well-being. In Bayanga, I spoke with Tito Basile, the director of the Dzanga-Sangha Protected Area, who told me that the park currently employed some hundred and fifty people and has paid its employees continuously since 1989—even during the recent political tumult. When I asked Turkalo if the jobs had changed local attitudes toward nature, she said, “Some people have changed, but not many. People are desperate, because they’re so poor and they’ll do anything to survive. It’s the economics. And, unless the economics change, it’s hard to know how they’ll change their outlook.”

Paula Kahumbu and other African-born wildlife experts are more optimistic. The parks provide “massive public benefits to local people,” Kahumbu said. “Poaching was an illegal activity that takes away resources from local Africans, while bringing insecurity and threatening livelihoods.”

It’s particularly troubling that, beginning in June, according to Basile, the forest ministry will allow logging operations in buffer zones surrounding the parks. One of these operations, leased to Sinfocam, a subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company called Vicwood, will operate within ten kilometres of Dzanga bai.

Alexandra Pardal, an activist for Global Witness, an organization that investigates connections between conflict, corruption, and natural-resource exploitation, characterizes the Central African Republic as a “phantom state,” with no control over much of its territory. She refers to the country’s timber as “conflict timber,” and points out that in the southwest, outside Dzanga-Ndoki, local antibalaka elements derive much of their revenue from extorting logging trucks at illegal checkpoints.

Filip Verbelen, a forest researcher for Greenpeace, says that conducting industrial logging operations adjacent to areas of outstanding conservation value, such as Dzanga bai, creates enormous problems, in that it results in an influx of workers and cash, which are intrinsically linked to poaching.

Nir Kalron worries about the poachers’ return. “Where they find elephants, they’ll go,” he said. “The only thing keeping them away now is the U.N. presence. No question about it, they will come back. Where else will they find such quantities of ivory?”

Turkalo told me, “It’s not my job to create security. My job is to come here every day and observe elephants.” Standing on the viewing platform, as the mist lifted after a rain, she looked out at the elephants milling around the clearing. “I’m pretty realistic about what these animals are up against,” she said. “Especially in the last thirty years, their world has become extremely imperilled. We’re losing the war to save it. The problem is that they have less and less habitat. There used to be wilderness all around here, but now there are roads and logged areas, and elephants are being compressed into smaller and smaller areas. Elephants need a lot of space.” ♦